Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Dungeon Baby

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there were a family of trolls who lived in a dungeon. There was Mama Troll, Papa Troll, little Finntroll and his sister Finnita. They stayed underground except at night, for the light of the sun would turn them to stone. There were other monsters in the dungeon besides the trolls, and they all got along quite happily (most of the time).

Among the other inhabitants of the dungeon were the Knockabout Skeletons, who in life had been naughty children who refused to grow up. They were always making mischief with each other and getting into trouble.

There were the slime family, who did not have brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers like the troll family. They had all subdivided from a single cell, so their relationships were quite different. Still they loved each other very much.

There was the Flesh Golem, created and abandoned by a mad wizard, who always seemed melancholy and only came out on special occasions. It was rumoured that he had had a wife once, and lost her, and nobody knew where she had gone.

There were the goblins, who loved treasure more than anyone else in the dungeon, and were always coming up with mad plans to get more of it. They would often go up to the surface, or down deeper into the caverns, until Mama Troll scolded them and told them to stay at home.

And last of all there were the Hattifatteners, who didn't speak and kept to themselves all the time. Nobody could tell what the Hattifatteners did with their time, but they didn't seem to be dangerous; and occasionally one of them would follow Finntroll around for a while, almost as if they had become friends.

There were other monsters that lived deeper in the caverns - ogres, demons, and perhaps even a sleeping dragon. Who could say whether they were friendly or not? Sometimes the goblins or Finntroll would go down and meet them.

Other times humans would come down from above to try and steal 'treasure' from the monsters. But what they thought was treasure were strange things like Mama Troll's old crockery, or the little sparkly stones that got caught in the slimes' bodies by accident. Sometimes the humans could be very dangerous, but they didn't come often.

All in all though there weren't many adventures and not many things happened, until one day something amazing arrived:

A human baby!

None of the monsters knew what to do with it. How would it be fed? How would it be looked after? What to do if it started crying?

And this was no ordinary baby either. Its parents had mysteriously vanished, but apparently they were very important in the human world. Soon the dungeon baby began to crawl off where it wasn't supposed to and got into all sorts of trouble. Because of the Dungeon Baby, all sorts of adventures began to happen, sometimes scary, sometimes exciting. All the monsters would have to work together to raise this baby safe and sound.